![]() Quote of the Day
Carcanet Press is our most courageous publisher. When you look at what they have brought out since their beginnings, it makes so many other houses seem timid or merely predictable.
Charles Tomlinson
|
|
Book Search
Subscribe to our mailing list
|
|
Her BirthRebecca Goss![]() 10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, British, Women
Imprint: Northern House Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (80 pages) 9781847772381 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (Kindle) 9781847774460 £9.95 £8.96 eBook (EPUB) Needs ADE! 9781847774453 £9.95 £8.96 To use the EPUB version, you will need to have Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) installed on your device. You can find out more at https://www.adobe.com/uk/solutions/ebook/digital-editions.html. Please do not purchase this version if you do not have, or are prepared to install, Adobe Digital Editions.
...clover
with an unlucky lobe, the rarest of anomalies that would flourish and defeat her from ‘Foetal Heart’ Shortlisted for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection In 2007 Rebecca Goss’s newborn daughter Ella was diagnosed with Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly, a rare and incurable heart condition. She lived for sixteen months. Her Birth is a book-length sequence of poems beginning with Ella’s birth, her short life and her death, and ending with the joys and complexities that come with the birth of another child. Goss navigates the difficult territory of grief and loss in poems that are spare, tender and haunting: ‘Going home, back down / the river road, will be a foreign route without her’.Shortlisted for the 2015 Warwick Prize for Writing Selected for Next Generation Poets 2014 It must be at once the most painfully personal and the most restrained and sparsely written poetry collection of the year... It's poetry of witness. The language is simple; the images are simple; the feeling is all. It's feeling no one wants to have, and it is handled with immense grace. Katy Evans-Bush, Poetry London Something close to a poetic journal, the poems are by turns meditative and bewildered, uttered in the quietest of delicately weighted language, as if the failing child and the experience alike could not bear too much pressure or noise. What transformations there are, are tentative and quietly sustained. Jane Draycott, Canto She [writes] with astonishing success, to which the key is a brilliant sparseness consistently adding up to more than the sum of its parts. Her linguistic tact and her judgement never falter... Lawrence Sail, Warwick Review The poems have an almost unbearable beauty... Peter Kennedy, poetrywivenhoe The poems in Her Birth unfold their story of love, loss and grief for a baby daughter with pared-down precision and scorching intensity. Helen Dunmore Echo Fetal Heart Room in a Hospital Skin-to-Skin Toast Clinic Echo Palliative A Dream of Heart Babies I Sweat When I Swings Ward at Night Severe Ebstein’s Anomaly A Child Dies in Liverpool Post St Mary’s Her Birth Mining The Postmistress Honey Stretch Marks The Highchair Print Mining You’re Lucky You Can Dream About Her October Muscovado Sugar My Neighbour’s Himalayan Birch The 21st of March Mothers of the Dead Found Helpline The Lights Sunday Papers Grief Goes Jogging Peeing at the Odeon Repair Another Welcome Why We Had Another Baby Test Hyperemesis Gravidarum As Owls Do Clothes Welcome Shadows My Animal Lost Bench Telling the Tale In Memory of John Ernest Goss 1920–2011 Snail Moon Taking You There Last Poem Acknowledgements
Awards won by Rebecca Goss
Short-listed, 2019 The East Anglian Book (Poetry) Award (Girl)
Winner, 2014 East Anglian Book Awards for Poetry (Her Birth)
Short-listed, 2015 The Portico Prize for Literature (Her Birth)
Short-listed, 2015 The Warwick Prize for Writing (Her Birth)
Short-listed, 2013 The Forward Prize for Best Collection (Her Birth)
'The pieces form a narrative sequence that are variously painful, jealous, hopeful, and tender ... This fine balancing act between emotional and cathartic resulted in the collection being nominated for the 2013 Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry. Yet beyond any industry accolades, Her Birth is all about feeling and the grace to accept and move on with life'
Susan Darlington, Spectrum Culture Praise for Rebecca Goss 'Tenderness between mothers and daughters is the collection's keynote . . . graceful, measured and joyous' Suzannah V. Evans, TLS 'It is clearly with great skill that Goss demonstrates how one can be close to a subject, yet simultaneously far away... Girl can be read as a neutral document of experiences that observe details in the same way that one would collate data points. It is a chronology of moments that neither indicate the speaker's interest or ennui; they are simply pieces of an individual life.' Sarah-Jean Zubair, Poetry London 'Goss contiunes to mine distinctive terrain which makes the best of her poetry compelling... these poems are impressive for launching seams of intense emotion from so minimalist a source' Ellen Cranitch, The Poetry Review 'Rebecca Goss's poems have their own sure authority; they are never ostentatious or trendily experimental, and her voice rings out clear, promising always more to come' Patricia McCarthy, Agenda Ekphrastic Issue 'A passionate, tender, thrilling book.' Helen Mort 'This is a book about human bodies: freckles, fists, itches and that 'private reek'. Graphic, funny and tender, these poems jostle with bodies that swim, jog, fuck, medicate, spin on dodgems, grow up and grow ill. Rebecca Goss captures both the pleasure and the pain. Girl is a quivering, kicking reminder of what it is to be alive.' Clare Pollard 'From the first poem about a mother struck by lightning, closely followed by the delicate, intimate and equally astonishing title poem, 'Girl' - the first of a series inspired by Alison Watt's paintings that are threaded throughout this collection - I was totally gripped. Rebecca Goss's voice is quietly passionate. Her forms are exquisitely crafted. Her themes, of human fragility and of our bodies' capacity for pleasure and pain, are universal.' Vicki Feaver 'The people in these poems are split down the middle - by lightening, by the 'marquise cut' of birth, by love, and yet beauty flies from the breakage, something 'large, planetary'. These are poems of brave surrender to the accident of living, the constant somersault, and regardless of whether the change is huge or tiny - a thunderbolt or an unexpected freckle - it is always fundamental, always shattering, always a thrill.' Caroline Bird
You might also be interested in:
![]() Parallax
Sinead Morrissey
![]() Otherwise Unchanged
Owen Lowery
![]() Window for a Small Blue Child
Gerrie Fellows
|
Share this...
Quick Links
Carcanet Celebrates 50 Years!
Anvil Press Poetry
Aspects of Portugal
Audio Books
Carcanet Classics
Carcanet Fiction
Carcanet Film
Carcanet Poetry
FyfieldBooks
Lintott Press
Little Island Press
Lives and Letters
OxfordPoets
PN Review
Sheep Meadow Press
The Carcanet Blog
New Poetries VIII: Sinad Morrissey on Conor Cleary
read more
The Earliest Witnesses: G.C. Waldrep
read more
Conor Cleary: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
New Poetries VIII: Tara Bergin on Suzannah V. Evans
read more
Suzannah V. Evans: NPVIII: Meet the Contributor
read more
New Poetries VIII: Andrew Wynn Owen on Tristram Fane Saunders
read more
![]() |
![]() We thank the Arts Council England for their support and assistance in this interactive Project.
|
|
This website ©2000-2021 Carcanet Press Ltd
|